Project: Plutonium 3

Hey gang,
Just bought Ockie's Galaxy 4.5 project!! This project is going to follow my storage needs and upgrades, starting with taking Galaxy 4.5 and making it Plutonium!!!

Goals:
Fast and easy storage of course... I store every tv show I have come across, from 24 to The West Wing, I have pretty much everything, aside from any reality, (which I passionately "hate") At the time I am writing this, I have 10,331 episodes, 3.95tb, 250 shows... I have been working on gaining shows I lack via reruns in hd, so the space gets used fast!! I am starting to get a little more into movies and am seeing my collection grow... I add at minimum, 200-400GBs a month, between, tv, movies, machine images, a few clients backup and such.... Sorry guys, no porn here

History is as follows:

Plutonium 1:
Started with using my main computer as a server running a C2D and 4x 320GB HDs.. I used the Intel raid 5 built into my P5B-Deluxe.... Still running XP Pro 32bit at this point. Here is a picture from the end of October 2006...


Plutonium 1.5:
Soon after building the Plutonium 1 900GB raid array, (as is always the case!!) it filled. So in January of 2007, I bought a 5 3.5" into 3 5.25" back plane to house more drives. I ended up with 6 320GBs in raid 5 plus 2 500GBs in raid 1... This solved the problem of storage for a little while.. I used a hack that allows the full server raid functions to work in Windows XP Pro 32bit, and this seemed to work well, but more on that later.... This worked well, and served lots of data for several months, but still not having a dedicated server sucked, every time I need to reboot, would bring everyone to a halt.... I usually could run 1 month to a reboot, but still.....


Plutonium 2:
In March of 2007, Southern Minnesota was hit with a heat wave, temps in the 60s and I came home from work to find a BSOD a waiting me... Went to reboot and the raid array was gone, and to say the least, I was super scared... I went into work and grabbed a license for Server 2003 the same night; luckily after installing 2k3, the array came online with no loss. After that stress, I knew something had to change, and went on [h] that week and bought this case.... I moved all my drives into it and set it up nicely in the basement (more on that later too)
Plutonium 2.5:
I upgraded the now very small 320GB drives to 750s this past summer, with a nice 7.5TB in raid 5..
This is currently serving very well, but because of ever growing data, I need more drives, and I am pretty full.... The current price on 1tb drives has made upgrades very easy, and I picked 3 up in the last month for great prices, thanks to the guys on the Hot Deals!!!


Plutonium 3:
December 2007
Going to start with incorporating Ockie's Galaxy 4.5 into Plutonium 3..
It will start with a lot of recycled parts, but get some upgrades down the road...
Starting with:
PC Power and Cooling 750w Power Supply
Biostar Socket 939 TForce mobo
AMD Opteron 146
1GB RAM
2 Supermicro 8 port "dumb" controllers
ATI Radeon 9250 video card in PCI...

And for the drives:
(10) 750GB Seagate 7200.10
(1) 500GB Seagate 7200.10
(1) 1TB Hitachi
(2) 1TB WD Green Drives
(1) 80GB Seagate 7200.9 for OS....

I am going to continue to run Server 2003, but am thinking of maybe someday moving to Linux or Open Solaris... 2k3 is sooo stable and easy to admin, if it were as unstable as XP or Vista, I would switch in a heartbeat, but I get great uptime

Here is one of the latest pictures of Galaxy 4.5, before being striped and shipped to me


Plutonium 4:
July 2008
Norco RPC-4020 4U Rackmount Server Case
ASUS DSBF-DE Dual LGA 771 Intel 5000P
(2) WINTEC 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM
(2) Intel Xeon E5410 Harpertown 2.33GHz 12MB L2 Cache LGA 771 80W Quad-Core CPU
Sony NEC Optiarc Black SATA Slim Combo
Slimline SATA>Normal SATA cable (off of Ebay)

Reused Parts from Plutonium 3
Areca 1280ML, with 2GB Cache, and BBU
(22) 750GB SATA HDs in RAID 6
80GB SATA HD (boot drive)
PC Power and Cooling PSU 750w


Plutonium 3.75
A backup server to Plutonium project, not going to run raid arrays or even run much, going to be unplugged most of the time, so I have offline backup of my data... Been a scary with no backup!!
Not sure on the case yet.
Asus P5M2 SAS Mobo
4GB ECC RAM
Pentium D 830
OCZ 600W PSU
ADAPTEC AAR-21610SA RAID Controller (remember, JBOD, simple disks)
Misc drives, prolly old drives from former projects...

More to come soon!!!

Nice so that new case holds 30 HDD's? I've got comcast and I've been thinking about starting to record movies from on-demand, they have all kind of good movies. If you don't mind me asking what do you use to record all those shows with? I've been looking into getting a T.V. tuner for my pc that records but I want one that has a good picture.

So, um..Can I send you some HDD's and you fill them up? LOL

Mostly just HD stuff...=)

BrinNutz said:

So, um..Can I send you some HDD's and you fill them up? LOL

Mostly just HD stuff...=)

Click to expand...

If you can get me HDD and enclosures, even I could... having access to a university's 7MB (yes, MB, not Mbit ) line works wonders for downloading off usenet and such

Looking forward to this project... been all over Galaxy and I can't wait till I get my own place in a year or so (in uni atm) and run my own dedicated server/storage pc ;D

astrojunke said:

Nice so that new case holds 30 HDD's? I've got comcast and I've been thinking about starting to record movies from on-demand, they have all kind of good movies. If you don't mind me asking what do you use to record all those shows with? I've been looking into getting a T.V. tuner for my pc that records but I want one that has a good picture.

Click to expand...

I have a HDHomeRun (on Clear QAM Charter), 2 USB Vbox ATSC (local Over The Air) and 2 ATI 550pros, (SD, actually, rarely used)
Currently using 2 Windows XP Media Cener Edition 2005 boxes to handle recording.....
I am going to be moving to a rack server for recording, look for a cool project to start on that soon!! Going to switch to Beyond TV.... Usually VOD, is in the clear, but in SD, really depends on the cable co....

BrinNutz said:

So, um..Can I send you some HDD's and you fill them up? LOL

Mostly just HD stuff...=)

Click to expand...

You know, if we lived in world without the RIAA and MPAA, I would not even feel bad about sharing tv, I look at tv much different then say movies/music/other works of art... But we live in the current, where networks are hurting for ratings and willing to blame anyone for failure.... I also hate the fact that there are great series's, which still have yet to be released on dvd.....

gjvrieze said:

You know, if we lived in world without the RIAA and MPAA, I would not even feel bad about sharing tv, I look at tv much different then say movies/music/other works of art... But we live in the current, where networks are hurting for ratings and willing to blame any for failure.... I also hate the fact that there are great series's, which still have yet to be released on dvd.....

Click to expand...

I'll take that as a public no...I'll pm ya..hahaha

veritas7 said:

If you can get me HDD and enclosures, even I could... having access to a university's 7MB (yes, MB, not Mbit ) line works wonders for downloading off usenet and such

Looking forward to this project... been all over Galaxy and I can't wait till I get my own place in a year or so (in uni atm) and run my own dedicated server/storage pc ;D

Click to expand...

Usenet, whats Usenet I will say, for tv, Usenet is great, lets face it, when your recording misses the first 10 minutes of House, a lot people are going to feel it is far to go grab it on bit torrent.... Leo and other hosts even admit to this on TWiT..... I would not fore see a judge honoring a lawsuit against someone who only downloaded a copy of a missed show off of say Usenet, where no file sharing (ie, uploading while downloading) is happing...

Ockie actually PMed me to say that he is working on boxing Galaxy last night into today!
Should be a cool project, I have all sorts of ideas that I too add in witting!!

I'm watching you.

looking foward to see what you do with Galaxy 4.5

astrojunke said:

Nice so that new case holds 30 HDD's? I've got comcast and I've been thinking about starting to record movies from on-demand, they have all kind of good movies. If you don't mind me asking what do you use to record all those shows with? I've been looking into getting a T.V. tuner for my pc that records but I want one that has a good picture.

Click to expand...

It holds 36 hard drives in its current config.

Well as promised here is a more info/update post....

When I got to Plutonium 2, I moved the server out of the living areas and into the basement of our 100 year old house.. I started with just running it on a crate, but soon warmed to the idea of a room for my gear/servers/parts... Well my dad and I spent better part of 2 weeks building this room....

We came by one side sanded 3/4" plywood for free, and I knew I needed plywood to hold wire management and gear, so it worked out very well. Once I had the room sheeted, I sprayed it bright white and mounted shelves for extra parts, servers, boxes.... Over the summer, I moved all my networking/internet gear into the new "finished" server room... I hate the summer heat, so it gave me some fun work, I had 4-5 switches all over the house to get all the machines plugged in and I moved all of those to home runs to the server room....

We also wired the server room with 2 20amp outlets, so I wold not be power bound.... I have every computer/tv/ht gear UPS protected, with the Plutonium on its own Belkin 1500va......

My needs are growing by the day, I now have a MySQL server running for friend's game patch, and it needs 24/7 uptime...

I switched from Qwest DSL (3Mb/896Kb) to Charter cable (10Mb/1Mb) over the summer also, dropped my pings to say 4.2.2.1 down to 19ms, and google at 20ms!!

I considered building a Pfsense and/or M0n0wall router, but the D-Link DGL-4100 and DGL-4300 serve me very well, I have never had internet/network downtime in over 1yr....

I use Logmein, from work to use my main machine, so good uptime is super important.....

Here are some pictures of the serer room 2-4weeks, not much has changed in this time, but you will see Plutonium 3 installed within a week!!!

This is the server/parts wall, it is to the right as you can see the picture was taken from the doorway..


Here is lower on the wall from inside the room..


This shot shows my network/internet/tv tuner and splitter wall with a spot to set up a desktop for client machines I work on, with my old lappy sitting, I use the laptop for playing XM online 24/7.....

Instead of having so many surge protectors, perhaps a purchase a few that have more plugs? Either this or this would serve you quite nicely.

dont try and fix something that isnt broke ^^thats in reply to the surge protectors post

protias said:

Instead of having so many surge protectors, perhaps a purchase a few that have more plugs? Either this or this would serve you quite nicely.

Click to expand...

It is hard to replace the power strips without powering some of my gear down, the network gear has not been touched since at least 6 months ago, The worst is the darn power bricks for all the routers/switches/etc... Need to get some of those short "extension" cords.... The modem and the router to the left are 24/7 have to be running, the second router is for my private home network not as important given that I run static IPs......

$h0ck3r said:

dont try and fix something that isnt broke ^^thats in reply to the surge protectors post

Click to expand...

Thanks for understanding!!! It looks better in the flesh then on the pictures, the wires are very managed, but do not appear that way on the pictures....

gjvrieze said:

Click to expand...

Why fit carpet to a room dedicated to computer parts?

Concentric said:

Why fit carpet to a room dedicated to computer parts?

Click to expand...

Hey man, it is [H], does why even matter!!!! Seriously, I like to work at home barefoot, huge change from work at 45 hours a week!!!

Ockie got busy and has not gotten the case out yet, he says he will ship it tomorrow morning, so no news on that front... I did however get about 75 dvds of info moved onto the array today, I have about 200 dvds of info that was not yet on my array, so I figured that would be a great project for my nice long weekend.... I am loading about 1.5tb of data on today and tomorrow, so at least I can stay busy Being able to work on it over Christmas, was one of the main reasons for upgrading at this time; I have not had a non weekend day off in almost 2 years, and I took a nice 4 day weekend so as to have time to make the case swap....

gjvrieze when do u expect to be getting the case from ockie.

jojo1224 said:

gjvrieze when do u expect to be getting the case from ockie.

Click to expand...

He should get it in two days I think. Man, that's the last time I am buying a cube case, it was a royal PITA finding a box for it, and when I did, it couldn't even fit in my truck Shipping was... well lets just say it's pretty much the equivalent of dropping soap in a prison.

Ockie said:

He should get it in two days I think. Man, that's the last time I am buying a cube case, it was a royal PITA finding a box for it, and when I did, it couldn't even fit in my truck Shipping was... well lets just say it's pretty much the equivalent of dropping soap in a prison.

Click to expand...

Ya delivery is supposed to be Friday...
Believe me, I drove Ockie nuts over the Christmas weekend with status updates, we will all know when I get it!!!

Bad news, the case ended up a day late, so I will not have it till tomorrow (Saturday)
Will take pictures as soon as I see the box!!!

Good news: I got her!! Such a large box!!
Bad news: the case looks great except that the front panel clips got broke in shipping...
If anyone knows how I can get replacements, please pipe in.....

Galaxy in my server room:


Look at all those sata cables!!!


Galaxy meets Plutonium!!!


Here is broken pieces...

Plastic epoxy is your friend. It'll fix that right up assuming you have all the parts.

thebeephaha said:

Plastic epoxy is your friend. It'll fix that right up assuming you have all the parts.

Click to expand...

That is actually what I am going to do, just picked up some super strong epoxy, and hopefully that will take care of it... Will port pictures of how the epoxy works out

In other news, I am working on getting a 16 port raid card, and also putting some thought into getting 8 more 750gb Seagate 7200.10s to bring my array up to 16 drives in raid 5!! I found that Zipzoomfly has been the cheapest for the past few weeks, so I think I use them.....

My current software array is 8x 750gb sata, 2x 750gb ide.... Thinking that I will use the 2 ide drives in another array for small stuff.....

Also my best friend, has a matching 80gb 7200.9 sata, and I am getting it off of him, so I am going to put my OS in raid 1 (I had it in raid 1 for a few months, before the case got too full)....

Ockie said:

Man, that's the last time I am buying a cube case, it was a royal PITA finding a box for it, and when I did, it couldn't even fit in my truck Shipping was... well lets just say it's pretty much the equivalent of dropping soap in a prison.

Click to expand...

Good God, man, that box was freaking huge, I would say it was close to 40"x30"x30", maybe even more, aside from the small problem with the clips, it came through shipping pretty well....

I have spent countless hours reading the Galaxy 4 thread, and you cannot believe this beast till you see it with your own eyes

gjvrieze said:

Good God, man, that box was freaking huge, I would say it was close to 40"x30"x30", maybe even more, aside from the small problem with the clips, it came through shipping pretty well....

I have spent countless hours reading the Galaxy 4 thread, and you cannot believe this beat till you see it with your own eyes

Click to expand...

Shipping was a fun and unexpected $107. Last time I deal with cube cases. Damn case couldn't even fit in a Dell 6950 box


I will see if i can locate these clips for you, sorry about that


EDIT: Since I dont' exactly know what the clips looked like before hand, would these work? http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=22679

Here is just the male end. http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=210&products_id=22677

Ockie said:

Shipping was a fun and unexpected $107. Last time I deal with cube cases. Damn case couldn't even fit in a Dell 6950 box


I will see if i can locate these clips for you, sorry about that


EDIT: Since I dont' exactly know what the clips looked like before hand, would these work? http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=22679

Here is just the male end. http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=210&products_id=22677

Click to expand...

Geez, we are only 3 states away, I would not have thought it would be even half of that shipping cost....

It is not your fault, prolly was in the cold getting banged around.... I like the case a lot, but I think the front could use a little better mounting design....

The male end is the piece, sweet, cheap and easy to replace if needed; I think the epoxy worked great and I may buy a few just to be safe

This is not the best picture, but you can still see it turned out nice

Well, go up at 9 AM this morning and got started... I ended up working from 9 AM till 5-6PM to get pretty much everything done that I could....

Case coming a part for lite cleaning....


Look at all those drive trays!!


It is a convertible!!


First drive mounted, a Hitachi 1TB!!


Parts stripped from Plutonium 2.5....


PC Power and Cooling 750w power supply...


Manage all those damn PCI-E cables!!


A shot with come of the power wiring done...


First power up with the drives installed..



I did not get a lot of pictures with the sata cables, because they will change with the addition of a hardware raid card in the next couple of weeks
That was a lot of work and now Windows in resyncing the old 6TB array since the drives changed location, Windows is freaking out!!
Off to hang with friends and watch tv!!

I had a problem with Windows resyncing the array, it got to 13% and then failed the array, it did this twice, so last night, I unhooked all the sata cables, and re-managed them,and then my array finally rebuild and I am good.... I do not know if it was a loose cable, a bad port in one of the back planes or a weird port on the Super Micro controllers, but in any case, I am just glad to have my media back online, my family has been going nuts with nothing to watch for 30hrs!!!

Not to threadjack, but that's a lili cube, right?

http://www.silverpcs.com/product_info.php?products_id=316&osCsid=5e5b764c9c8072f5a45941a00a4d7ba4

If that gluejob breaks on you.

mwarps said:

Not to threadjack, but that's a lili cube, right?

http://www.silverpcs.com/product_info.php?products_id=316&osCsid=5e5b764c9c8072f5a45941a00a4d7ba4

If that gluejob breaks on you.

Click to expand...

It is the PC-343B, and thanks for the link

We need some inside pics.

jojo1224 said:

We need some inside pics.

Click to expand...

I will see what I can do, I am just about dead, I worked 50-60hrs over the weekend, and have a 4 day work week (36hrs) left.....

I did put 1 stick of Corsair Expert ram in there, so it looks cool scrolling: Plutonium 3!!! (gotta RMA the other stick as it fails memtest)

Plus I am going to have the multi lane raid card soon, which will get all the drive plugged in and clean the case up a lot

I am starting to think about ordering the Areca 1280ML, I am going to be up to 20x 750gb drives by the end of January, and really just want one large array.. The guys on the disk threads, think I would be irresponsible to use raid 5 with a hot spare with that number of disks.... I agree, even though this array will be backed up, it is not enough or often enough, so I think having some data security on the array, would not hurt For what is worth, I have only lost 3 drives in the last 5 years of hard use, out of say 50+ drives, so I like those odds....

here is a screen shot of the drive management console...

Looking good gjvrieze!

Looking at that drive management screen i was like "huh.. he's not using much space" till i saw the 4% free on that 6.2T array. Nice


Time for me to rebuild, my little 1.2T array has 80gb free

WesM63 said:

Looking good gjvrieze!

Looking at that drive management screen i was like "huh.. he's not using much space" till i saw the 4% free on that 6.2T array. Nice


Time for me to rebuild, my little 1.2T array has 80gb free

Click to expand...

Ya, I was not watching the drive space, then looked one day and was like, wow, where did it do!!!

I know, once you have an array of any size, you will be upgrading every 6-12months....

If I go with the 1280ML, I will have OCE, which would really help me, and it has multi card support, so if I fill one, I can still grow the array....
I am thinking of 16-18 drives in raid 6 with 2 as hot spares, I think I can sleep go then

WesM63 said:

Looking good gjvrieze!

Looking at that drive management screen i was like "huh.. he's not using much space" till i saw the 4% free on that 6.2T array. Nice


Time for me to rebuild, my little 1.2T array has 80gb free

Click to expand...

I need to start filling my drives i have 633gb of storage in my server and i have 545.5gb free.

I sold the 2 750gb IDE drives I was using in my 10 x 750gb array, so last night, I powered down (God, I hate powering down, huge inconvenience) and pulled 1 IDE drive from the array, powered back up and add the 2 7200.11 750s i just got yesterday, made dynamic, and did a repair on the volume... Now I am waiting for it to finish resyncing.... I did not want to do this (always a small chance of another drive failing in the array while rebuilding), but I need the money for the 2 drives so I can buy more of the hardware.... I also saw that Frys had 750gb SATA 7200.10s for $180, so I ordered 2, and 2 day shipped them, so I should have 12 by next week, not to far off from my goal of 18-20!!!

We need some inside pics